"Climate change is existentially terrifying and also frustratingly abstract-a combination that makes it really hard for many people to connect with in a personal way, as one does with say, a work of art.
Enter the Chicago-based duo Luftwerk-Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero-who have bridged that disconnect with their latest public art installation, White Wanderer, currently on view in Chicago's Riverside Plaza through October 1st. Bachmaier and Gallero are known for their luminous light-based installations in public spaces and architecture, and their latest effort is their first attempt to incorporate climate change messaging into their work.
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"Matthew Burtner is a composer and "eco-acoustician," weaving sounds he finds in the Alaskan tundra into his musical compositions. With climate change headlining the news, he hopes artists documenting the glacial melting might awaken their audiences -- and contribute to discussions about solutions. Valerie Kern of Alaska Public Media joined Burtner on a recent sound collection trip."
"ATTA (Amplifying the Tropical Ants) is a multimedia research project on ant acoustics in the Brazilian Amazon producing results in bioacoustic anaylsis, sound works, and music composition.
I first visited Manaus, Brazil as an artist-in-residence with Labverde in July 2017. On this trip I made preliminary recordings of ant species and their habitats and used these as the basis of several new music compositions. Since then, I have been collaborating with entomologists Erica Valle and Fabricio Baccaro at the Universidade Federal do Amazonas / INPA on a collaborative research project encompassing bioacoustics, field recording, behavioral ecology, taxonomy, music composition, and acoustic ecology.
Ants are doing so much of the vital work maintaining tropical rainforest ecosystem functions: herbivory, seed dispersal, predation, decomposition, soil aeration - and their habitats are in turn crucial to global climate regulation. Can listening to ants generate empathy and encourage us to do our part in countering climate change? Can listening to insects remind us how little we know - and that we are not in charge of nature? Can it shift our perspective and encourage us to consider a biocentric viewpoint? "
"Honey bees are one of the treasures in the world. An increase of waveform communication leads to good information exchange of mankind. In the biological view, it causes a lot of side effects and lifestyle changes in other living organisms. The drastic changes are causing the natural imbalance in the ecosystem and become a global issue. There are significant reasons for bee colony collapse disorder (CCD) like pesticides, disease and climate change. Recent studies reveal that a cell phone tower and mobile phone handset are also causing side effects to honey bees due to radiation emission. Most of the researchers concentrated on biological and behavioral changes in a honey bee due to radiation effects. For that, the real-time radiation levels have experimented but the different technical perspectives such as radiation emission levels, handset radiation emission measures and multi-sources of radiation are needed to be considered during research. This study aimed to provide possible research extensions of colony collapse disordercaused by cell tower and mobile handsets."
This project explores how innovative art projects on public urban screens can combine with electronic social network systems on smaller screens to initiate an international dialogue on the problem of adaptation to climate change. The main theme of this trans-disciplinary research is on the environmental and cultural significance of water in three cities in the Asia- Pacific region: Melbourne, Shanghai and Tokyo
"Scientists and musicians are recording the sounds of unfreezing water to document and predict the effects of climate change. Can their work help slow it, too?"
"Noise is not the most important problem in the world. Compared to the disasters of famine, war, and global climate change, the existence of "unwanted sound" hardly counts as a problem at all. It rarely emerges as a public issue in countries struggling with the worst forms of poverty and violence. So far as I am aware, there is no Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise in the cities and villages of Afghanistan and the Congo. "
"Some people prefer utter silence as they kayak down a river. The ambient sounds of birds flapping their wings or water whooshing beneath them is sufficient. Others, however, might opt for a little music. Or how about some eerie, underwater sounds that can help scientists track pollution and climate change?"
A work by Bill Fontana.
"Notre Dame has been described as the soul of Paris. As a result of the tragic fire in 2019, its bells have fallen silent. However, these bells were not damaged in the fire and are silently waiting and secretly "listening" to the sounds of Paris around Notre Dame.
This is a continuous live streaming sound sculpture that makes audible the simple physical fact that these bells are secretly ringing all the time. I think of this secret ringing as being the heartbeat of Notre Dame. The sounds that the bells produce are created by their harmonic response to the ambient sounds of Paris that surround Notre Dame, as revealed by a live network of accelerometers mounted and live streaming from all ten of the bells. The physical fact that these bells are harmonically excited by the ambient sounds of Paris is a phenomenon that this artwork makes public in a way that will not only be beautiful to hear but will have a healing relevance to Notre Dame's fire, a healing relevance to the suspended sense of time created by the Corona Virus, the tragic war in the Ukraine and the ongoing environmental threat of climate change."
"The artists who contributed to this final chapter of YCTM examine the sonic response-ability of the world that struggles to free itself of humanity. Starting with memories and dreams intercepted by sound in film and moving towards the felt effects of climate change and extinction, the chapter holds space for an empathic future where human-centred civilities become holistic code. This chapter is co-presented with Infrasonica and with Kunsthall Trondheim."
Remember Forests?
People around the world recorded the sounds of their forests, so you can escape into nature, and unwind wherever you are. Take a breath and soak in the forest sounds as they breathe with life and beauty!
And while you are here, why not help to grow what keeps us alive? Climate change and governments are destroying our forests. Let's leave some trees for our grandchildren to climb and make the steps to restore our planet.
"What do you think we are not hearing?
Can listening encourage us to challenge our assumptions, and change our behaviour and decision-making processes concerning our relations to non-human species? Can human opinions on invertebrates be shifted through listening?
I have been developing a process for constructing synthesized "built" soundscapes of hidden sounds. Built Hidden Soundscape: Pipeline Road, Gamboa is a preliminary result from this research. I made the field recordings for this built soundscape while at the Digital Naturalism conference in Gamboa, Panama in August 2019. The video shows a scrolling image of a spectrogram. A spectrogram is a bioacoustic tool that shows how sounds sit together in a soundscape. The Y axis represents frequency (Hz) and the X axis represents time. This spectrogram, however, focuses on 'hidden sounds' - sounds that cannot be heard by humans without the use of technology; sounds that are easily heard by human ears are excluded from this synthesized, artificial rendering of a soundscape. The sound work consists of field recordings from Pipeline Road in Gamboa, bookended by the dynamic dawn and dusk soundscapes of Pipeline Road. This built soundscape includes ultrasonic sounds (above the range of human hearing, played back at lower frequency), substrate-borne vibrations, and otherwise very quiet sounds. "
"Even if you're aware that glaciers are melting and sea levels are climbing, these facts can be difficult to connect with on an emotional level. A sound artist at the University of Virginia is hoping to change that by turning scientific data into music, and, well, the result is pretty damn cool."
In this second interpretive video for "Living with Concepts," Norway-based artist Jana Winderen discusses the four-channel audio installation "Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone: From the Barents Sea to Lake Ontario": https://vimeo.com/613751409
Composed from field recordings in the Barents Sea along the marginal ice zone (an ecologically vulnerable, dynamic border between the open sea and the sea ice), Winderen's composition documents wildlife activities that all depend on the annual spring bloom: plankton, bearded seals, humpbacks and orcas, crustaceans and spawning cod. On UTM campus, these sounds connect the vulnerable ecologies of the Barents Sea with the seasonal rhythms of local forest ecologies, and the distressed waterways of Lake Ontario and the Credit River.
"Spring Bloom" plays during daylight hours only. It is periodically shut off in response to seasonal ecological activity, determined in consultation with faculty in UTMBiology. See the Blackwood website for current playback conditions: https://www.blackwoodgallery.ca/program/living-with-concepts
First presented in Mississauga by the Blackwood for "The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea," "Spring Bloom" is currently installed at the University of Toronto Mississauga campus, 2021-2024, as part of "Living with Concepts." Artwork storage and transport sponsored by Musket Transport Ltd.
Video by Vuk Dragojevic.
"Silencing of the Reefs is a long-term (started in August 2011) project by sound artist Jana Winderen, supported by TBA21. Jana Winderen listens into the lively, diverse and dynamic, though threatened acoustic environments of coral reefs and their neighbouring ecosystems. By using the latest technology in terms of recording equipment and hydrophones, she is able to get the best-quality recordings possible."
"Sound recordings from three glaciers in Iceland, pressed into three records, cast, and frozen with the meltwater from each of these glaciers, and played on three turntables until they completely melt. The records were played once and now exist as three digital films. The turntables begin playing together, and for the first ten minutes as the needles trace their way around, the sounds from each glacier merge in and out with the sounds the ice itself creates. The needle catches on the last loop, and the records play for nearly two hours, until completely melted."
"Time and Tide Bell" is a permanent installation, existing of 12 bells around the U.K. in several very different locations, rung by the sea at high tide. The rise of the water at high tide moves the clapper to strike the bell. Played by the movement of the waves, the bell creates a varying, gentle musical pattern.
As the effect of global warming increases, the periods of bell strikes will become more and more frequent, and as the bell becomes submerged in the rising water the pitch will vary."